Bulletin editor craft

The baritone should be the best musician of the four, as his part is the most difficult, generally. The range is not likely to be large, but the quality should be good and the sense of pitch very accurate. The baritone is consistently called upon to sing the trickiest intervals, whose accuracy will make or break a barbershop chord. An unerring ear and a great musical confidence are the valuable assets in a baritone. The world is full of instinctive tenors, but natural baritones are rare.

When deciding to use one or two words for barbershop, it depends on the reference.

We seldom write about the place where we get our hair cut. That's properly written as one word, regardless of how it's spelled on the local shop.

We used to always capitalize barbershop and related words. Now they may or may not be capitalized, but the spellings should be consistent. An exception is when barbershopper immediately precedes a name. Then it should always be capitalized: Barbershopper Joe Smith.

It's a little-known fact that an earlier one as illustrated here [Webmaster note: Sorry, I don't have the artwork, so you'll have to get your paper copy of PROBEmoter, or a 1982 Harmonizer, to see it.] preceded our current logograph. This first emblem was imprinted on membership certificates as early as 1939 and was carried on the nameplate of Barbershop Rechordings, the earlier version of The Harmonizer.

History does not provide who designed the early logo, but it was probably someone in Tulsa, Okla., where the early membership certificates were printed. Founder O.C. Cash had many friends among newspaper people, so perhaps it was a local newspaper artist who made the design.

In 2004, an operating name for the Society (Barbershop Harmony Society) and a new logo were developed that is in use today.

There is nothing as beautiful as the last few chords of a barbershop song when those diminished seventh chords are preparing the listener for the final tonic chord. This is why there is so much pleasure in singing tags. We eliminate most of the song, and relish those last few chords.

The last chord of a pure barbershop arrangement is always made up of two tonic notes and a third and a fifth. Pure barbershop is what our organization is about. We seldom sing sixth, dominant seventh or ninth chords. On the rare occasions that we do sing these, it's almost invariably because it is unavoidable because the melody falls on one of these notes. We don't intentionally stick in these chords for variety. Our goal is to preserve barbershop harmony, and that doesn't mean intentionally singing non-barbershop.

Some Sweet Adeline arrangements are a different matter. I recently heard a Sweet Adeline chorus sing a song that ended in a chord made up of six distinct notes. The goal of Sweet Adelines is similar to ours. Some of their arrangements are pure barbershop, but some are far from it. I'm not knocking Sweet Adelines; I'm merely pointing out that some of their songs - even for competition - are entirely different from our Society's. Harmony International, the other female barbershop group, has a goal similar to the Barbershop Harmony Society..

The difference in the two organizations - Sweet Adelines and the Barbershop Harmony Society - is that Sweet Adelines sing mostly barbershop, while the BHS preserves it. Who says we can't sing sixth chords? Nobody. But, by doing so, we are not preserving our heritage.

As I was saying just the other day to a gentleman from the American Psychic Society, "Is there such a thing as a happy medium?"

I wouldn't mention this at all except that the question has popped up again: Is barbershopping a hobby or a form of recreation, or is it another form of flagellation (that) we are expected to suffer in a kind of holy ecstasy?

One of our brotherhood, writing in The Harmonizer, deplored the heresy of "singing for fun." I rise to protest. I sing for fun, and when it stops being fun, I'll stop singing and find something else to do. I know I'm wrong. The fact that coveys of barbershop choristers willingly submit to endless hours of mind-drugging drill proves it beyond argument. They want to win, and who am I to object to such a laudable ambition?

I am obstinately clinging to the conviction that I'm keeping my faith with the early apostles of barbershopping who selected an utterly absurd name for the Society and elected to our pantheon of heroes a quartet called The Bartlesville Barflies. You can't tell me that those guys would spend eight to ten hours a week standing on risers, singing the same handful of musical phrases over and over, snapping peevishly at each other, then embarking on a regimen of prayer and fasting in final preparation for The Big Six Minutes! Whatever the old Barflies lacked in musical sophistication, they made up for in good, old-fashioned sanity.

Man and boy, for more than two decades, I've sought in vain to determine the precise point where barbershopping stops being fun and becomes drudgery. Reluctantly, I've come to the conclusion that it can't be done. One man's total boredom is another man's delirium of bliss. And, as Mark's mother said to his father when the family became vegetarians, "Never the Twain shall meat."

What I object to, and strenuously, is the inference by the drill instructors of our brotherhood that those of us who can't be bothered marching to their drum are satisfied to sing badly. That's the worst kind of non sequitur.

I insist that you can sing for fun and still sing well. Not as well as you might - true. And not as well as others who are chasing the will-o-the-wisp of perfection. But as well as you can within the reasonable limits (that) you set [to] sacrifice. To argue otherwise is to say you have no business playing golf unless you intend to challenge Jack Nicklaus on the PGA tour. Or that you have no business buying pastel crayons and a sketch pad unless you expect to hang your work in the National Gallery of Art.

The most entertaining quartets I've ever listened to would get lost in the crowd of competition. But they're singing for fun and they're sharing their fun with an audience. And they are making more friends for barbershopping than all the perfectionists in the Society.

I can't believe that's all bad.